Republican Commissioner Terry Ramey should pay his taxes and stop threatening the media for reporting on the issue, according to a rare joint statement issued by the other four Republicans on the Haywood County Board of Commissioners.

After a marathon misinformation session at an August Haywood County Commissioners meeting during which commissioners fought back against comments from the public that were not based in fact, the misinformation hasn’t stopped — and neither has county government’s fight against it.

Haywood County may have found a buyer for a county-owned 22-acre plot off Jonathan Creek, as long as everything goes smoothly during the lengthy due diligence period.

In the interest of transparency, all responses from local officials regarding the Jan. 6 insurrection have been published online, in their entirety. Some submissions may have been lightly edited for grammar, spelling and punctuation or to conform with AP style. 

A request by the Town of Clyde to disband its police force and contract with the Haywood County Sheriff’s Office for policing services was approved by Haywood County commissioners Sept. 8.

Last month, members of the Haywood Branch of the NAACP took a trip to Montgomery, Alabama to visit a museum honoring more than 800 Americans who were lynched between 1877 and 1950.

There’s a monument there for each one of them — a long, steel box resembling a coffin, engraved with their names and places of death. One bears the inscription, “George Ratcliff, Haywood County.”

On Jan. 15, The Smoky Mountain News contacted almost every elected official in Haywood County for whom an email address was listed with the county’s board of elections. Around half failed to respond, but those who did were sometimes too verbose for print, so an excerpt from their response was used in the Jan. 23 edition of The Smoky Mountain News. In the interest of transparency, their full responses are included here.